Wine 1.3.0 Begins A New Development Cycle

It was just two weeks ago that Wine 1.2.0 was released as the second major stable release of Wine in the nearly two decades that this free software project has been around, but the developers are now out today with their first development release of Wine 1.3. The Wine 1.3.0 release already pulls in a great deal of new code.

The Wine 1.3.0 release presents the beginnings of a user-interface for the built-in Internet Explorer, supports cross-process OLE drag & drop, a new built-in wscript.exe (Windows Script Host) program, and open/save dialogs now remember the last used directory. There's also translation updates and various bug-fixes. The Wine 1.3.0 release announcement shows there are at least 113 bugs fixed between the Wine 1.2 and 1.3.0 releases.

If the past 1.0 and 1.2 releases are any indication, it will probably be about two years before this code (plus many, many more development releases to come with their bi-weekly snapshots) are released as stable in a Wine 1.4.0 release. Before that will likely be a Wine 1.2.1 release that back-ports some bug-fixes for those not using these bi-weekly development snapshots.